beta2 release summary

Release Notes

The purpose of the IFC2x Edition 4 is to enhance the capability of
the IFC specification in several areas of building elements, building
service elements and structural elements and accompanying basic
definitions. It also corrects several known
technical problems found since the release of the IFC2x Edition 3
specification and to improve the documentation generally. Some elements
that have been deprecated in earlier releases have been removed or
adjusted.

A "What's new" section is added to the specification to a quick overview of major changes, the IFC2x3
TC1 to IFC2x4 beta2 change log should be consulted for more details.

Purpose of the beta 2 release

The beta 2 release is the functionality and major schema change freeze for IFC2x4.

The purpose of publishing the IFC2x4 beta 2 release is to further
encourage the international buildingSMART community to provide feedback
and issue reports in order to increase quality and implementability of
the next IFC release. The focus of the feedback should be to fix still
existing bugs and inconsistencies between the various parts of the IFC
schema and to improve documentation and to drive out ambiguity in
definitions. However no major schema changes are acceptable for the upcoming beta3 and release candidates. Any comments about the ease of use and examples to
demonstrate the use of IFC concepts that could be incorporated are
highly appreciated.

Invitation for review

We invite all interested parties to review and comment on the IFC2x4 beta 2 release. See "how to use the issue database" on details for registration and usage of the issue database, if you are registered already go directly to the IFC Review Issue Database. The IFC2x4 beta 2 review process has started on 28. Sep 2009 and is expected to close on 21. November 2009.